Yesterday (November 12th) Microsoft announced that Bing had finally come out of Beta stage in the UK. So what has prompted Microsoft to remove the Beta tag and effectively announce their satisfaction with Bing in the UK? The answer, it seems, lies in localised search: “We promised to remove (the Beta tag) only once our experience would differ from the …

That’s the message coming out of Hitwise as a follow up to their report last week that paid search traffic is down by 26%. Specifically the share of paid clicks to insurance web sites is down 22% and to retail sites down by 20%. However, search-reffered traffic to finance sites is up 16% year on year and up 9% to …

After the excitement of session 1, we moved on to the world of the ‘Global Search Universe’ for session 2. If I’m perfectly honest, this session wasn’t half as interesting as the keynote speech, but I still got a fair bit out of it. However, my notes are more of a stream-of-consciousness than any useful text, so I’m simply going …